Friends of the Behavioral Economics Club, this week we present the paper “Women are Better at Selecting Gifts than Men” by Pollmann, M. M. H. and van Beest, I. (2013), in which authors carry out a series of experiments to check if as it is socially believed, women give better gifts than men.
We know that giving gifts is a universal phenomenon that exists in almost all human cultures. Billions of dollars are spent each year on gifts when birthdays, holidays, and Christmas arrive.
However, although gifts are symbols of love and appreciation, not all of them are valued as much as the one who gives them hopes.
Gifts serve very important interpersonal functions because they help build and reformulate relationships. For example, a previous study mentioned in the article showed that bad gifts can damage a relationship.
That is, a good gift benefits the receiver, benefits the giver and the relationship, but it always depends on whether the gift is appropriate or not.
Choosing the perfect gift is difficult, and it is believed that one of the factors that play a role in how successful its delivery will be is the gender of the person who gives the gift.
Socially, the idea that women give better gifts is accepted because they tend to be more concerned with expressing love and affection than men. But can it be demonstrated empirically?
Authors believe that this may happen due to differences in people’s sensitivity levels, especially two factors: first, interest in other people; second, one needs to be able to take the other’s perspective. That is, to the extent that a person is interested in others and can effectively adopt the perspective of another, he/she should be better able to predict the latter’s preferences regarding receiving a gift. In the collective imagination, those who possess these most developed characteristics are women.
To improve the first aspect, the autism spectrum quotient was used. This questionnaire captures the degree to which people care about social interactions. And men usually have more autistic traits than women, which suggests to the authors that the social interest of women is higher and, therefore, they hypothesize that women would indeed give better gifts.
The second aspect, interpersonal sensitivity, is measured by the interpersonal reactivity index. This scale captures the extent to which one empathizes and engages in perspective taking. Women request to have significantly higher scores than men in this questionnaire; that is, women feel more empathy.
In the first of the studies carried out, authors selected a series of people close to their environment, who had different relationships: family, romantic or friendship, and had known each other for an average time of almost 17 years.
Participants were visited at home and authors told them what the study was about. To create a realistic gift selection situation, brochures were designed with images of 30 different gifts with a maximum value of approximately 20 euros.
The results showed that women selected better than men, without affecting the different types of relationship.
Later, authors conducted a second study to improve the results of the first one and give the results greater precision. They selected a total of 67 men and 121 women, all college students.
In this study, a young woman was used as the target person, who indicated her preferences for the subjects to consider. Each person was asked to imagine that they had to give her a gift of about 10 euros, and it could be selected from one of the stores that this target person indicated she liked. Depending on whether they chose stores that the target person liked more or less, they would score higher or lower.
The results again supported the hypothesis that women are better at giving gifts, as they scored higher in this latest study.
It seems that the fact that women show more interest in interpersonal issues explains why they can select better gifts for others.
Still, the authors conducted a third study, where the results continued to point in the same direction.
They also found that heterosexual men react more negatively when their female partner gives them a gift they do not like, compared to heterosexual women when this occurs. Therefore, women have had to gradually develop this ability to give better gifts.
One limitation of the study is its novelty, so authors recommend that further research should be carried out on the subject in order to draw more precise conclusions.
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